The best books on Mountaineering

Mountaineering is such a physical pursuit. What do you think mountaineering books can offer the outdoorsperson?

The mountaineering book offers privileged access to a level of deep, embodied experience that the mountaineer has gained in often quite extreme settings. You’re gaining a window into a way of life, a way of being. A sport, a pursuit that is exceptional and can produce life-changing experiences.

Well I think that brings us directly to your first book recommendation: Walter Bonatti’s Mountains of My Life, which has been published by Penguin Modern Classics. Would you introduce our readers to Bonatti and what he achieved?

Bonatti was born in 1930 and was at his peak in the 1950s. He was extreme in who he was and what he did. He was climbing the cutting-edge routes—extremely difficult climbs—as a teenager with no gear. He would be in, like, a potato sack, doing the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses—which is a route that climbers today still idolise.

Then he would be putting up these new routes that were completely elite, so extreme. He was such a gifted climber. He was just amazing.

Right. Mountaineering and rock-climbing also seems to have developed as a sport an incredible amount over the 20th century.

Well, alpinism was born when a lot of bourgeois Victorians were going out and climbing up these big peaks for sport—to get ‘first ascents.’ These were men and women, and they were quite often out with a local mountain guide from the area who had all the knowledge and experience, and would help them go out and do it.

Walter Bonatti was born in Bergamo, quite close to the Alps, and he worked as a mountain guide himself. So he would take people out, did all these amazing climbs, and then in 1965 he just stopped. As though he had ‘completed climbing.’ And so he stopped.

And the book itself—what is his writing like?

The book is a collection of chapters taken from a number of Bonatti’s books, translated and edited by Robert Marshall, an Australian who helped to clear Bonatti’s name in the 1990s, after years of controversy surrounding the events of the 1954 Italian K2 ascent.

Each chapter centers on a particular climb and tells the story of it. It’s written in the first person, and you get privileged access into his mind. He’s very interesting, a very intelligent man. He became a journalist and photographer afterwards, and travelled the world as an explorer. So his writing is good as well.

One of the interesting chapters is about the Italian K2 expedition in 1954, which was when they were there to get the first ascent for Italy as part of that nationalist—well, fascist—world conquest mission. He was young to be joining that expedition—in his twenties, still—but he had made such a name for himself and was climbing so well that they knew he was strong and experienced enough. This whole episode was really strange and controversial. Afterwards he ended up completely ostracised for telling his side of events, which when you read it was completely surreal.

What happened?

Essentially he was there working with a high-altitude porter to deliver oxygen up the mountain to help the two climbers who were going to the summit. Then something strange went on—they struggled to find the tent of these two guys. They would shout down, but wouldn’t show where they were. Bonatti and his porter were basically left outside overnight in the death zone in a storm.

So Bonatti recounts all of this—the strangeness of it, the getting dark, the being up there with no tent or bivvy gear, digging a ledge out and having to save this porter’s life multiple times. He was in a desperate state, terrified, and just trying to launch himself down the mountain. It basically seems like the two were left out for dead intentionally.

This is Bonatti giving his side of the story, what happened. After this, understandably, he didn’t trust other people and went off to do other climbs on his own.

You get privileged access to these exceptional experiences and these controversies, and how it shaped him as a man. It’s beautifully written as well.

Mountaineering is a dangerous activity, or it can be. I suppose that must be part of why it can be so emotionally or spiritually affecting.

Yes. With Bonatti you get a real insight into that. His psychology is interesting. He was probably a bit neurodivergent in some way. What was driving him to these absolute extremes? After that episode he went to prove himself by climbing this new route on the Dru, this big beautiful rocky peak over Chamonix. He spent six days solo on this face, in extreme conditions. He was completely driven, completely obsessed with having to prove himself. That climb now has iconic status in Chamonix, because in 2009—due to climate change—the ‘Bonatti pillar’ collapsed, and all that is left is an epic rock scar.

His attitude towards mountaineering couldn’t be more different to that of the author of your second book recommendation. This is Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.

Yes, I do like extremes. I love this book in so many ways. It’s maybe ‘the woman’s approach’, or the ‘embodied approach.’ It’s about experiencing the totality of the mountain.

At first I wasn’t sure about including it on this list, because you could argue it’s not about mountaineering. But then, what is the definition of mountaineering? It’s focused on the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, but I guess what you could say that what she’s doing is ‘hill walking,’ but let’s not split hairs.

The Living Mountain is her perspective of going out, using your body and all of your senses and moving in very particular ways—similar to what a mountaineer or rock climber does. She and Bonatti do similar things but have different approaches and techniques for accessing and understanding and engaging with the mountain.

She talks about going in to the mountains, not up mountains. She’s less about goals and more about atmosphere and nature.

Yes. Her goal is to know the mountain in its entirety, the living mountain, and to bring that Zen Buddhist philosophy into a way of being or experiencing the Cairngorms. Which is so refreshing, and it’s important to have that perspective as an approach, it’s a brilliant balance.

I think this book is a nice complement to the writing of Gary Snyder, an American poet and essayist who brought a similar Zen approach to forestry and trail crew work. But next—shall we look at Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider?

This is another big contrast, it’s closer to Bonatti than to Shepherd. Harrer was German. The book centres on the north face of the Eiger, and the history of climbing that iconic face. In a way, I guess you could compare it to The Living Mountain in that it focuses on a particular mountain place.

Given the histories of these Eiger ascents, this is a compelling book, it’s thrilling. There’s a whole sub-genre in mountaineering literature: the disaster narrative. You know, where things have gone wrong?

Like Jon Krakauer’s writing about death on Everest.

Exactly. Into Thin Air. There’s also Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void. But I really love The White Spider because it captures a particular moment in climbing history as well, when they were pioneering these routes, using old equipment, and generally doing things that were so unknown—something that Bonatti writes so beautifully about as well.

I think that is one of the big changes in recent mountaineering: the element of going out into the unknown isn’t so present. Our equipment and technology and knowledge has progressed so much that there aren’t anything like as many uncertainties to handle now compared to what they were doing.

I suppose a lot of these books are so compelling because they fall into the classic quest narrative. They head into the wilderness, face trials, and come back changed.

Yes. This book is such a page turner. I mean, the north face of the Eiger has a train that runs right next to it, that will take you all the way up. When a rope failed, the climber was next to the railway and the people in the train could see this climber but they couldn’t get to him to save him. It’s an amazing story and it’s sometimes truly horrifying.

That reminds me of all those reports from Everest of climbers stepping over dead bodies on their way to the peak. So much can go wrong in mountaineering, and if it does there’s so little other people can do.

You’re going out into something that has such a fine edge, you know? It’s an extreme environment you’re going into. It’s high risk—although you always work to manage the risks and to minimise them as much as possible. It’s high consequence. Making a mistake is not like making a mistake at home on flat ground.

Do you think that speaks to something in the personality of the people drawn to mountaineering?

I mean, definitely, yes, there’s something in you that makes you want to go out and meet that edge and work with it—for whatever reason. I don’t know. It feels real in a way that other parts of life sometimes don’t.

That’s an interesting way of putting it. Your next author is a previous Five Books interviewee: Helen Mort, the British poet. Why do you recommend her mountaineering-themed collection No Map Could Show Them?

This is an amazing collection. It’s radical, what she is doing. And it’s great to include poetry in this list.

To create this book, she did a lot of research into archives, looked up some of the female pioneers and brought out a lot of untold histories of the women who were involved in early alpinism and mountaineering, sharing some of these stories that have been overlooked or deliberately hidden.

In one of her poems, she reflects on this brilliant comment from a journalist, who wrote—tongue-in-cheek—that now the Grépon had disappeared because two women had climbed it without a man. How could any self-respecting man climb this route anymore?

It’s a clever, fun take on that history, and why we have a man’s history of the mountains. She also brings a lot of herself into it—you can feel your way in, be among the emotions of that all, which is cool.

Is the world of mountaineering still exclusionary towards women?

It’s opening up, and recently has been very consciously opening up. Even in the space of time that I’ve been climbing—ten, fifteen years—the transformation I’ve seen has been crazy. A huge, huge change. But there’s a long way to go. A lot of the culture we’ve inherited has been masculine, and the literature is male-led. So there’s more to explore and to understand. But it’s been cool to see the change happening live in front of us.

You’ve chosen a female climber’s memoir as your final book recommendation. Could you introduce us to Gwen Moffat and Space Below My Feet?

Moffatt is a complete legend. She’s a British mountaineer who had her 100th birthday recently. She was the first ever female mountain guide in the UK. She deserted the army in 1945 when she met a bunch of climbers and became a climbing bum. Space Below my Feet is basically an account of that—of leaving the army, getting into climbing and discovering mountains. So you get all that passion and that love for the rocks, for that way of life—you know, sleeping in barns, washing in lakes. That sense of going into poverty in the name of doing the thing, because that’s the thing that makes sense.

Then she writes about climbing across the UK and gaining the skills to do that in the Alps as well. You get a real window on what the culture was like then. You get a brilliant sense of a mountain journey as a way of life.

Tell me more about that.

Absolutely. It’s everything. It’s what you do, it’s what you think about, what you talk about. It shapes your whole body and your whole psychology. The more you do, the more it becomes a part of you. And then that’s just who you are.

I wrote a memoir called Time on Rock which was published in 2022. It’s a nature writing book about rock-climbing and connection to nature through the mountains. Every chapter centres on a different place and a different geology. It’s a lot about what it’s like to climb there, and how those particular rocks—whether it’s gritstone or granite or limestone—shapes your experience as a climber, makes you move differently. It’s a lot about physical movement sequences and patterns as well as how it shapes the people and the place and the landscape.

I think that intimate knowledge of the rock has a lot in common with the Nan Shepherd approach to mountaineering.

Yes, that’s central to what I wanted to show, which is what I felt was missing from a lot of the more conquest-driven narratives. You know: we went there, we climbed this route, it was hard, we got to the top. I’m more interested in what you learn about the world through rock climbing, through this intimate physical relationship with the mountain created through putting yourself there and being in a heightened sensory state.

I think you wanted to make a special mention of a sixth book?

Yes. Only getting to pick five mountaineering books is cruel. If you asked me on a different day, I could give another set of five. But I want to mention Feeding the Rat by Al Alvarez, about his friend Mo Anthoine. There are a lot of climbing memoirs, so it is quite cool to get one that’s a biography of a brilliant climber, and Alvarez is trying to get into that psychology: what drives the climber and why do they do it?

This is where the title, ‘Feeding the Rat’, comes in. It speaks to that sense of absolute compulsion – there’s a rat gnawing away inside of you that you have to feed. I have a good friend, a proper climber, who just loves this book and has that tattoed on him: ‘feed the rat.’